Death Race 2012: GQ on Politics

Appleton, Wisconsin is a town of about 70,000 people, the anchor of a tri-county area that straddles both sides of the Fox River and butts up against Lake Winnebago, about two hours north of Milwaukee. It's a paper town. One of the biggest employers in the area is Kimberly-Clark, which you'll recognize from the bottom of a Kleenex box. Another is Appleton Papers. Neenah Paper is a few minutes up the road.

Because of this, and because it's in a swing state, it is also one of Mitt Romney's favorite places to publicly name drop. At the first debate: "I met a couple in Appleton, Wisconsin, and they said, we're thinking of dropping our insurance; we can't afford it..." At the debate last night: "I've met some of those people. I've met them in Appleton, Wisconsin." Romney never finished that story, but he didn't need to. The people weren't the point. The point was Appleton, Wis.

Forgive me for being sensitive: Appleton, Wis. is where I had my first kiss, fractured my left wrist (twice), made my first friends, smoked my first cigarette, assembled my first joint, lost my virginity, fought my first hangover and graduated from high school. I have an attachment to the place. So do presidential candidates. Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes. It's gone blue every year since 1984, but the last couple of elections have been close calls. It's considered "in play" in a way that California (where I was born), Chicago (where I went to school) and New York (where I now live) are not. Wisconsin has fewer than six million residents.

This is the great, ongoing patronization that swing states endure, election year after election year: a sort of glassy, doting preoccupation that's not unlike the way a stripper treats a regular costumer. It's transactional: she makes him feel special, important, unique: he gives her everything he has in his wallet. But he's not unique, or important or special. She doesn't care about his kids, his job, his education. She cares about the ease with which she can win his love, and then separate him from his cash. When Mitt (and Barack Obama, for that matter) talks about time he's spent in cities like Appleton, what he's really doing is letting you unhook the the clasp of his tasseled bra.

Guys: this isn't how our elections are supposed to work. I'm not going to get into it about the electoral college versus popular votes, but this thing where it just comes down to stroking off a handful of states is the kind of cynical, reductive nonsense that makes people distrustful of politicians altogether. We're not as facile as they think we are.

And it's cheap. Follow this out to it's natural end: If you win one, single vote because you mentioned someone's hometown—if some guy out there is like, well, I don't really know who I'm voting for, but Mitt told this story about Appleton, so...—then you have every reason to feel dirty about that vote. That's not a real vote. It looks and talks like one, but you and I both know that it has nothing to do with your policy, or with your experience, or even with that weird intangible of how presidential you look when you're on stage. So I'm making a special appeal to the candidates: Stop mentioning people you meet on the campaign trail. Just stop. Those stories are awful anyway. From now on you can talk only about your hometown, where you grew up, where you've lived for an extended period of time or where you currently own a home. Mitt, for you in particular, that should provide more than enough to work with.